Comité pour l'abolition des dettes illégitimes

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Debt in History

History: the Policies of the United States toward its Neighbours in the Americas in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries

4 November 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

In 1823, the government of the United States adopted the Monroe Doctrine. Named after a Republican president of the USA, James Monroe, it condemns any European intervention in the affairs of “the Americas.” In reality, the Monroe Doctrine served (...)
What other countries can learn from Costa Rica’s debt repudiation

1 November 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

In January 1917, the government of Costa Rica, under President Alfredo González, was overthrown by his Secretary of the Army and Navy, Federico Tinoco, who called new elections and established a new constitution in June 1917. The Tinoco putsch (...)
The USA’s repudiation of the debt demanded by Spain from Cuba in 1898: What about Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, etc.?

8 September 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

The USA declared war on Spain in the middle of 1898, and sent their navy and troops to “liberate” Cuba from the Spanish yoke. Spain was defeated and negotiations between the two countries began in Paris in order to reach a peace agreement, finally (...)
Part 4 of the interview “History of the CADTM’s anti-debt Policies”

From Dashed Hopes to Success in Ecuador: the examples of South Africa, Brazil, Paraguay and Ecuador

25 August 2016 - by Eric Toussaint, Benjamin Lemoine

Interview with Eric Toussaint, spokesperson and co-founder of the international network of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM). Interview by Benjamin Lemoine. This interview presents the genealogy of the anti-debt (...)
Part 2 of the interview “History of the CADTM’s anti-debt Policies”

The First Testing Grounds for the CADTM’s Methods to Counter Illegitimate Debt: the examples of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo

11 August 2016 - by Eric Toussaint, Benjamin Lemoine

Interview with Eric Toussaint, spokesperson and co-founder of the international network of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM). Interview by Benjamin Lemoine This interview presents the genealogy of the anti-debt (...)
Part 1 of the interview “History of the CADTM’s anti- debt Policies"

The history of the CADTM and its struggle against illegitimate debt: Origins

2 August 2016 - by Eric Toussaint, Benjamin Lemoine

Interview with Eric Toussaint, spokesperson and co-founder of the international network of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM). Interview by Benjamin Lemoine. This interview presents the genealogy of the anti-debt (...)
Simón Bolívar in the Debt Labyrinth

20 July 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

From the start of the struggle for independence, Simón Bolívar, like other independentist leaders, launched a policy of internal indebtedness (which ended up benefiting the local ruling class) and external indebtedness toward Britain and its (...)
How Debt and Free Trade Subordinated Independent Latin America

28 June 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

Contrary to the dominant narrative, the 19th century Latin American debt crises did not cause the difficulties experienced by the Northern banks and other creditors. The truth is that, from the beginning the debt crises were caused by the (...)
How the South paid for the Northern crises and for its own subjugation

20 June 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

The debt crises in the periphery and the crises of the central capitalist countries are joint means to subordinate States to their creditors’ will. From Latin America to China, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, the ruling classes (...)
Debt: how France appropriated Tunisia

13 June 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

Tunisia’s fate at the hands of France in the second half of the 19th century serves as a good example of debt used as an instrument of dominating and alienating a state’s sovereignty. In 1881, France conquered Tunisia and turned it into a (...)
Debt as an instrument of the colonial conquest of Egypt

6 June 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

This article is dedicated to the memory of Youssef Darwish 1910-2006 (in Arabic: يوسف درويش), the Egyptian activist who relentlessly fought for justice and internationalism. Repeatedly jailed and tortured for his communist commitment and his crusade for (...)
Greece: Continued debt slavery from the late 19^th century to the Second World War

17 May 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

This series of articles analyses Greece’s major debt crises by placing them in the international economic and political context, an approach that is systematically absent from the dominant narrative and very rarely present in critical analyses. (...)
Part I of the series “Greece and debt: two centuries of interference from creditors”

Newly Independent Greece had an Odious Debt round her Neck

26 April 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

Since 2010, Greece has been the centre of attention. Yet this debt crisis, mainly the work of private banks, is nothing new in the history of independent Greece. The lives of Greeks have been blighted by major debt crises no less than four times (...)
The 1994 Rwandan Genocide - The Use of Rwanda’s External Debt (1990-1994)

7 April 2016 - by Michel Chossudovsky, Pierre Galand

Twenty-two years after the 1994 Genocide, the role of financial institutions has to be fully understood. Development aid and foreign loans were channelled towards financing the military and paramilitary. The donors turned a blind eye. This (...)
Towards an explanation of the deadlock in third-world development

5 January 2016 - by Eric Toussaint

Karl Marx (Marx, 1867), in Capital Vol. 1, identifies the various sources of primitive accumulation that allowed the European capital to spread globally, specially the colonial plunder, public debt and the international credit system. (...)
Black days: 4^th August 1914 Germany and 13^th July 2015 Greece

15 July 2015 - by Yorgos Mitralias

The black day 13th July 2015 Greece can claim a single historical precedent: August 4th, 1914, when the German Social-Democratic Party in the Berlin Reichstag spelled the beginning of the tragedy of the twentieth century, a tragedy whose (...)
Debt and industrial agriculture: a sacred union

27 October 2014 - by Giulia Simula, Anouk Renaud

Debt and industrial agriculture are deeply interrelated. To understand this connection we need to go back to the vicious cycle of debt. Firstly, by looking at how conditionality attached to International Financial Institutions (IFIs) loans has (...)
Public debt in Poland: from the Communist period to the present economic crisis

10 March 2014 - by Gavin Rae

This paper considers the question of public debt and how it impacts upon other areas of socio-economic life in Poland, in the context of the recent global economic crisis. It begins by placing Poland’s public debt in its historical context that (...)
Bankocracy: from the Venetian Republic to Mario Draghi and Goldman Sachs

11 November 2013 - by Eric Toussaint

From the 12th century to the beginning of the 14th, the Knights Templar, present in much of Europe, had become the bankers for the powerful and had taken part in the financing of several crusades. At the beginning of the 14th century, they were (...)
Series : Debt cancellations : a historical perspective (part 4)

Democracy and Debt: Has the Link been Broken?

11 March 2013 - by Michael Hudson

Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by (...)
Series : Debt cancellations : a historical perspective (part 3)

Personal endebtment and debt forgivness in the Roman empire

17 December 2012 - by Jean Andreau

There was no public debt in Grecian-Roman antiquity. This absence is peculiar to the period, unlike Italian cities of the late middle ages and modern times, and modern states. Some Greek cities certainly did borrow publicly, especially in the (...)
Debt cancellation: a historical perspective (part 2)

Debt cancellation in the land of Canaan in the first millennium BC

26 November 2012 - by Isabelle Ponet

Social justice, in particular in regard to the cancellation of debts that keep the poor enslaved to the rich, is a leitmotif in the history of ancient Israel. The Deuteronomic Code states that ’at the end of every seven years you must cancel (...)
The Marshall Plan and the Debt Agreement on German debt

24 October 2006 - by Eric Toussaint

The present contribution presents an analysis of the bilateral economic policies developed by Washington towards its allies in the Cold War context. The Marshall Plan replaced the World Bank’s intervention since the US came to the conclusion that (...)
The World Bank and the Third World Debt Crisis in historical Perspective

14 March 2002 - by Eric Toussaint

From the early ’seventies, McNamara saw the speed of growth of Third World indebtedness as a problem. He declared: “By the end of 1972, the debt totalled 75 billion dollars and annual servicing was more than seven billion dollars. Debt servicing (...)